Training Days 2010/2011 - On the Final Leg!

I'm currently sitting in the BA Lounge at London Heathrow Airport, waiting to get a flight down to Bangalore, India for the last leg of our OBIEE11g Training Days event. I'm joining Venkat, Ram, Diptesh and Jay from Rittman Mead India, and we'll have another class full of OBIEE developers eager to hear, and get their hands on, the 11g release.

So this is the final leg of our Training Days tour, which started off in London in October and then went through Atlanta, Bangalore, back to Atlanta, down to Johannesburg, up to Brussels and now back down to Bangalore. It's been a great event, and by my reckoning we've trained around 200 developers from customers, partner, independents and even Oracle themselves. Some of the most popular topics have been the new support for OLAP-style analysis using hierarchical columns, plus the new ragged; skip-level and parent-child hierarchies within the RPD; the new, overhauled release of BI Publisher; systems management using EM; the new architecture, particularly use of WebLogic Server; and the new KPIs and Scorecards available as a license add-on.

We've learnt a lot during the six months we've been on-tour as well. Some of the subtleties of the new hierarchy types, for example, weren't obvious at the start, and we add a lot of material to this as the dates progressed. We also added a new lesson on OBIEE 11g security, which actually became the major topic when we discussed upgrades as well. KPIs and Scorecards were also a popular topic, although interest wanes a bit when the licensing side is considered. Finally, from my perspective, I learnt a lot about mapping and Mapviewer over the various events, and by the end of the tour my demo in this area covered a lot more ground, including integration between maps and other BI objects.

So that's it for Training Days for now. We'll probably retire this event for a while now, at least until a new, major release comes out (11.1.1.5 or 11gR2, maybe 2012/2013?) Until then though, it's all systems go now for what is probably our premier event of the year, the Rittman Mead BI Forum 2011 which we're running in Brighton, UK and Atlanta, GA in May this year. We've lined up some fantastic speakers, including Jeff McQuigg, Kevin McGinley, Emiel van Bockel, Tony Heljula, Stewart Bryson, Jean-Pierre Dijcks, Andreas Nobbmanm and Phillipe Lions, and we've got keynotes from Oracle Product Development on both sides of the pond. If you've held back from Oracle conferences in the past because they're not focused enough on OBIEE plus supporting technologies, and you want to meet an audience who already know the basics and want to discuss advanced stuff, make sure you register now as this is the last event we'll be doing for a while.

Thanks to everyone who came to the six (and from next week, seven) OBIEE11g Training Days event, and we hope to see some of you in Brighton and Atlanta in May!